A young woman joins the Japanse airforce wanting to become an F-15 pilot, but instead is lured to an old hangar to be swallowed and regurgitated by a dragon. Repeatedly.

So far this season I’ve been mildly disappointed, as there hasn’t been any series coming out that’s as good as Yorimoi or Yuru Camp were last season. Hisone to Maso-tan comes very close though. For a start, the artwork is so different from what I’m used to seeing in anime, much more “western””? for lack of a better word. There’s a fluidity to the animation too which matches with it perfectly, just a cut above the norm. If it reminds me of anything, it’s last year’s Little Witch Academy, in that it looks like something designed to appeal to a worldwide audience, not just a Japanese or already anime fan one. And the dragon is adorable, very cat like in its behaviour.

But perhaps the biggest draw in this first episode was the protagonist, Third Class Amakasu Hisone. She looks like your typical shy anime girl at first, passively going along with the weird situation she finds herself in, until this scene, when she unloads all of her frustration and anger at her superior. Hisone then flees the hangar and ends up in the bike shed, where she’s found by one of her co-workers and she further unloads her frustrations on him, as she’s brutally honest with how she feels. It turns out that this is actually a part of her character she usually tries to suppress, that tendency to say whatever she’s thinking. Now there have been shy characters before, even shy, sarcastic characters, but this combination of a general meekness with an unexpectedly sharp tongue when pressured is new.

And it’s clear that Hisone isn’t intentionally trying to put down Kaizaki Nao here by calling her “an elementary school punk wannabe’, which is what makes it all the more funny. Because Kaizaki Nao is the stereotypical anime yankee character, a short, short tempered foul mouthed brat with a chip on her shoulder who is far less intimidating than she wants to be. I love that sort of character and have a weakness for anime or manga series featuring yankees. Having one in this series is the icing on the cake for me. Nao and Hisone play off very well against each other too.

Now one of the advantages of getting your first impressions out so late that the second episode has already aired (at least in Japan, as everywhere else it’s held hostage by Netflix) is that you can include the absolute kickass ending song that debuted in that episode. There’s no reason whatsoever for this to be a cover of a classic France Gall song, but I’m not complaining. Best ending of the season.